Bill Anders: The Right Stuff

The First Man To Photograph The Earth

Frame the Apollo program using the Cold War as a backdrop.

Bill Anders: A lot of people think, because NASA pushed the thought, that Apollo was a program of exploration. And yet, as Frank Borman is fond of saying, it was just another battle in the Cold War. To many people who weren’t born or old enough to absorb what the Cold War was about, it is hard to imagine the U.S. and Soviet Union poised on the brink of mutual annihilation. And that things like the missile gap, who got into space first, whose education system was better, were such strong political drivers of the 1950s.

President [John] Kennedy, with the suggestion of [Vice President] Lyndon Johnson, were grasping at ideas to show the world that America wasn’t a second-rate country, that capitalism wasn’t a flawed theory. That was the main motivation for Apollo. It was not exploration, more a jingoistic program demonstrating national technological preeminence that would catch the imagination of the American public.

So when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the flag on the moon, in a sense Apollo was over. The momentum kept rolling for a while but it became apparent to the Nixon Administration, where I was working at the time, that risks associated with further lunar flights didn’t equal the return of a few more lunar rocks. Personally, I was very interested in the exploration part, but most of the American public weren’t -- and still aren’t.

Your Apollo 8 mission wasn’t originally scheduled to go to the moon, just orbit the earth. Why was it moved up?

BA: We were in a race with the Soviets, and the moon happened to be the line that Kennedy had drawn in the sand. When it looked like, from the CIA’s perspective, the Soviets would launch a capsule around the moon, George Low had insight in thinking that if the Soviets did that they’d get 90% of the PR value of landing just by orbiting. So there was a change, this bold move -- NASA couldn’t do it today because they have so much oversight they’d tangle in their underwear -- to leapfrog our flight over the one in front of us, and go on the Saturn 5 manned for the first time to the moon.

It’s important to note that I believe the Russians never thought they were in a race to the moon. Kennedy was the one who said we were, and I think it caught the Russians by surprise. They, with a certain amount of intellectual justification, figured maybe we ought to focus on going around the earth initially, not try a stunt. But it turned out they did have a modification of their Earth orbit program with a more powerful rocket that could make a big figure 8 around the moon.

How did you feel personally about the flight change?

BA: I frankly was disappointed. I wanted to land on the moon. Neil Armstrong and I had been teamed up in Gemini. After the [Apollo 1] fire, he and I were the first two to check out in the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle and I thought, with a certain amount of justification, that we would be a lunar crew. I don’t think Deke [Slayton] had picked out yet who would be first on the moon, but his obvious favorites -- you could tell by body English -- were Borman, Armstrong, [James] McDivitt. They were considered good leaders, and I thought that with me assigned to the Lunar Module in earth orbit I would turn around and get on the 4th or 5th lunar landing flight later.

But when Apollo 8 was moved up and my Lunar Module taken away with the “battlefield promotion” to Command Module pilot, it screwed me for landing on the moon. And it didn’t take long to realize I was in the Command Module rut. I mean, can you name all the guys who flew in the Command Module around the moon not getting to land while their colleagues, in some cases juniors like me, bounced around on the surface? Who was the Command Module guy on the last lunar landing flight? I’m not sure I can tell you.

In retrospect, being first around the moon, taking the “Earthrise” picture and all that is like being a Viking voyager or somebody who went to the new world but didn’t go ashore. We did cross the ocean, so it wasn’t a bad gig. But I would have been a lot happier to swap Apollo 8 for a lunar landing on Apollo 15 or something like that.

So you’re disappointed you never walked on the lunar surface.

BA: Oh yeah. I was the boy amateur geologist in the program -- Jack Schmidt [geologist who landed on the moon on Apollo 17] was a late add. When NASA had geology trips, I’d volunteer -- I even did a couple of them twice! And probably suffered a bit in the eyes of the hard-bitten test pilots, because it’s not "the right stuff" to be interested in lunar rocks. I was also good at landing the LLTV. So, given my choice, I’d rather have landed. But I don’t have big angst over the fact I “only” was on the first flight away from the Earth.